Shouldn’t they always keep a’hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse? I can see from a liberal perspective that Trump is a nightmare (and frankly I’ve had enough of defending the idiot myself) but isn’t Pence something far more frightening? Trump used to be a Democrat and I think in a lot of ways he’s more liberal than the party whose standard he bears. Pence is far more at home with the hard-right party the Republicans have become.
If Trump gets impeached it may be possible for the Repubs to distance themselves from him, as he certainly couldn’t be impeached without Republican support. Pence could then run in the next election as the man who put country before party and got rid of Trump and it could even work. Wouldn’t it be far better for the Dems to leave a damaged Trump in office and then sweep resoundingly to victory at the next election as the party that would clear Washington of the dirt and corruption?
It seems to me that any prudent Democrat should be doing his or her best to prop the President up.
I believe Trump is a bigger threat to the country than I believe Pence would be to the liberal body politic. It’s as simple as that. Or in other words, better a competent and reasonably sane asshole* than a loose cannon lunatic.
Term used for comparative purposes - I don’t know if Pence specifically is an actual asshole, I just disagree with his politics.
I detest Trump, but I love the damage he is doing to the republican party. He is forcing them to admit that they value their party having power more than they value protecting America from its enemies with the Russia issue. He also forces the GOP to admit they don’t value competence or intelligence in their elected officials (which they’ve done before, but to a whole new level now). Also Trump wants to be a criminal dictator, and the GOP refuses to do anything about it. Luckily the courts are stopping him.
Then again, I guess you can say the same thing about me that in a way I prefer a corrupt, authoritarian criminal who works for our enemies because it harms the political opposition over a sane, efficient republican president.
Anyway, I’d prefer Trump as president as long as he doesn’t start a war. Trump is a threat to western democracy and civilized behavior, but if the intel agencies, FBI, judiciary, etc hold him in check the damage he does will be limited. If the dems win the house in 2018, it’ll stop his agenda even more and make his failings even more transparent. If anything, the damage done to the poor and working people, the environment, minorities, etc by president Pence would be worse. Also it isn’t like if Pence was president, that the modern conservative movement wouldn’t be comfortable with a deranged dimwit like Trump as president. At least with him as the face of the GOP the public are forced to confront how radical and irresponsible the right has become in the US.
I believe that Trump is doing active damage to the country. I believe that Pence will also do active damage to the country, but the damage he does will be more reparable. We’ve been in the forties before regarding rights and basic morality, and recovered from it; we can do so again. Trump, on the other hand, is trying to eliminate every spec of international standing that the country has accumulated since its inception. And that’s assuming he doesn’t do something worse.
That’s a lot of “ifs”. So far, we don’t see the Republicans doing anything but apologizing and hand-waving for the president, and I don’t see very many signs that they plan on stopping any time soon. Indeed, they–including Pence–seem eager to get their loyalty of the president forever memoralized in television, radio, and print media. So let’s say the Republicans finally do get off the Trump train en mass. All a Democratic nominee has to do is replay their apologia over and over and over again so that no one forgets the massive bag of feces the GOP has been for past several months.
Instead of wasting time clucking your tongue at the Dems for daring to put the country’s welfare before politics, maybe you should be scolding your fellow conservatives for ruining your party’s image by rallying behind shitshow leadership. I don’t think it will be the Democrats who will be full of regrets come 2018 or 2020.
Trump is incapable of going down smoothly or quietly. If he goes down (e.g. towards impeachment or resignation), it will mean the Republicans in Congress have turned on him, and Trump could never stomach such a betrayal without turning on them. He might start a 3rd party for spite.
Which is why the Republicans are in such a difficult position if the evidence continues to pile up against Trump. At what point would the full fury of an angry Trump be less damaging to them then continuing to support him?
First of all the OP is hilarious. Is the idea that the good of the country might be more important than politics that foreign of an idea to you?
I disagree. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure Trump really deep down wanted to be president. I think he ended up getting swept up in this. I think he wanted bitch and moan and get a lot of attention and the lose and bitch and moan more about how rigged the system was. We kind of know this because that’s what he was doing leading into election day.
I think he might threaten that. He’ll certainly bitch and moan because that seems to be his main talent, but ultimately I really doubt it.
Even if Trump wanted to raise a stink, what could he possibly do? When the dust settles, the dude isn’t a politician and, once ousted, won’t have any political influence. And unless Pence does the whole ‘customary pardon’ thing (which I suspect would be an extremely foolish political movie), Trumpy boy might end up doing his stinking from a jail cell.
Like so many I’m torn. There is the temptation to let him stew in his own juices (Or somebody’s juices, at any rate). But I think that the most Dems can do is let the Republicans know that they’ll have to go first on this because if they don’t, well, we don’t have the numbers and aren’t likely to get them anytime soon.
Ultimately, the adults will keep Trump from doing anything too boneheaded or dangerous. In the meanwhile, he slows them down and provides Jared and Ivanka (both Democrats) access to the White House, and Donald could always decide to flip aisles if Schumer and Pelosi started to fondle him in the right ways and/or Ryan and McConnell piss him off too much.
Pence, on the other hand, would be an unstoppable force of malice, with the Republican party still leading things. Maybe once the House goes Democratic it won’t matter too much, but certainly not before 2018, and I feel like having the Executive and Senate both Republican would still be a pretty good recipe for Christian Wahhabism to start bearing fruit.
Despite what one poster said, incompetence is easier to undo. Competence isn’t. Nefarious things, done competently, are going to stick around and pull everything down.
Personally, I’d like to see the pair of them taken under, together.
Pence has no part in the impeachment process, so he couldn’t make himself out to be some kind of savior of the Republic, particularly since he has repeatedly defended and carried water for Trump. Pence hasn’t inspired the cult of personality of sorts that Trump has with Trump voters, so he couldn’t necessarily count on the same base of support. Pence is in a different position than Gerald Ford, since Ford was appointed VP by Congress after Nixon’s VP Spiro Agnew resigned, so Ford never really had to be closely associated with Nixon when Nixon ran for re-election in '72. Even so, Ford’s pardon of Nixon still arguably caused a strong blowback against him. If Trump were to be impeached/removed with a criminal case pending and Pence pardoned Trump, Pence would be forever linked to the hip with whatever misconduct prompted Trump’s removal.
Trump has shown that his main weapons are his rallies and the support of the far right outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, Info Wars, etc. If impeachment proceedings began and he rallied his supporters that it was all really an attempted coup by the DC establishment because they didn’t want him to drain the swamp, he could potentially sow the seeds for mass violence. Trump has already encouraged small bouts of violence among his supporters against protestors at his early rallies, so we already know he is capable of it.
“Trump used to be a democrat and is more liberal than the rest of the Republicans” sounds like something I heard a year ago as to why Trump might be a super genius secretly trying to undermine the Republicans. Yeah, turns out there’s no surprise, he’s just a fascist moron who believes whatever the last person to talk to him says, including Alex Jones. He has no real agenda of his own except to enrich himself. As a practical example, the AHCA is a bill that no one wants, not even the vast majority of Republicans. If Trump was this secret liberal, he’d be opposing that, right? But he’s not, he’s trying to push it through for no discernable reason other than that’s what he’s been told to do. The idea that he’s more liberal to the Republicans and not pushing their agenda is obviously proven false at this point.
Furthermore, the President of the US has an incredible amount of responsibility and power to handle emergencies as they come up. The cold war may be over, but there are still tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in the world ready to go. We’re entrusting the peace of the world and the potential destruction of civilization to a deranged, willfully ignorant, unbalanced, senile sociopath. This is an unacceptable state of affairs. People have faith that “oh if Trump goes crazy, someone will stop him” but according to the actual procedure we have set up in our government for nuclear weapons there is no such “someone” to stop him. We have one of the more unhinged men on the planet in control of the doomsday switch.
It’s not hyperbolic to say that civilization faces an existential threat every day Trump is in control of the power to destroy it.
Agreed, though I think Pence might really be an asshole.
Right up until the moment the Senate finishes voting Trump would have full pardon authority; including the ability to pardon himself. He could also launch a military attack on somewhere like North Korea, Iran, or Scotland as a distractions, but thankfully even at his worst I have a hard time imagining him doing something that bad. At least not without getting so worked up he stokes out.
Here’s a scenario if been doing a half assed job of constructing in my head recently…
Q: Wouldn’t you rather run against Trump in 2020 than impeach him before then?
A: Why can’t we do both? Here’s how:
Dems take the house in 2018
Early 2019 House votes to impeach.
Mid 2019 there are enough Republicans in the senate that realize the party must remove Trump from office in order to have a chance in 2020 so Trump is convicted in the senate (mopery, perhaps).
Fall 2019 Trump declares his intent to seek the Republican nomination for president which he wins fairly easily by around May 2020.
Easy peasy.
Actually the timeline is way too tight from the seating of the D house in January to Trump’s removal in July(ish), but I can dream can’t I. Maybe Trump resigns before the 2018 election and then runs in 2020. He hates being president but he loves running for president.
Pence is the guy wearing brass knuckles who comes into your shop to beat the hell out of you. Trump is his methed-up sidekick who’s waving a shotgun around and shouting random paranoid hateful gibberish.
You fuckin bet I’ll get rid of Trump, even if it means I gotta take some hard punches to the gut in the process. Pence will fuck up your face. Trump might blow it off, you just don’t know.